Review Reports - A New Efficient Digital Image Encryption Based on Inverse Left Almost Semi Group and Lorenz Chaotic System

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article has some problems related to the research replication: there are references made to a chaotic system that is not presented: the test conditions and the parameters used (ambiguous hints are only given in Fig. 1 as it was a Lorentz systems "create logistic map based on Lorentz differential eq."). Following this an analysis of the encryption keys should be included.

There is no denial of the performance of the proposed schema but the performance problem should be evaluated through computational complexity analysis and an execution time evaluation/comparison. This would present the balance between robustness and performance.

- Fig. 1 also needs some pseudo code;

Optional: If the number of pages becomes an issue, images for a single photo or color can be included...

Some ideas are not clear:
row 24 "[...] because of the ideology of global village" what ideology or concept is discussed?
row 224 "[...] are haphazardly looked" - maybe randomly?

There are some language errors that must be corrected in the final version (this is only a brief list):
1. Introduction - row 28 "[...] on social media likewise Facebook...", row 29 "[...] from being theft, illegal copying ..."
2. Correlation analysis for adjacent pixels, row 227 "[...] are largely very little..." !
3. Conclusion - row 421 "[...] a chaotic continous systems were..."

Author Response

Responses to the Reviewers’ Comments

Dear Reviewers:

Thank you very much for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Information Confidentiality Using Quantum Spinning, Rotation and Finite State Machine” (IJTP-D-18-00398). Your comments are valuable and thoughtful for revising and improving our manuscript, and have the important guiding significance to our studies. We have read the comments carefully and have tried our best to make according corrections which are underlined in the revised manuscript. Meanwhile, we have written a point-by-point response to acknowledge your help and indicate where we have made revisions. The detailed responses to your comments and the main corrections in the paper are listed below.

Part A (Responses to the First Reviewer’s Comments)

Reviewer #1: In this research article authors used a completely new and innovative idea to design a new security encryption procedure by employing quantum spinning and rotations along with finite state machine. The idea of phase is utilize to encryption the secret key and also at the time of decryption, first of all decrypt the encrypted key. The present article is quite good and falls in the aims and scopes of the journal. This manuscript can be published after minor revision:

Our responses: We would like to express our great gratitude to the reviewer for reading and review our manuscript and giving us many kindly and professional suggestions. Without the reviewer’s help, we couldn’t improve the quality of the revised manuscript. According to the comments, we have revised the original manuscript carefully and made corresponding corrections for better readability in the revised manuscript. The reviewer valuable remarks give us further confidence and boost.

1. There are number of English mistake please correct it before sending it final revised version

Our responses: We are really appreciative to the reviewer for her/his carefulness and patience. We must make apologies sincerely for our carelessness of the examples and detail in English writing. According to the comment, we have revised the original manuscript carefully and made corresponding corrections for better readability in the revised manuscript.

2. Please carefully added commas and full stops
i. Page 7, Encryption algorithm step 8, use full stop,
ii. Page 8, step 4, put space in the word mod 24,
iii. Example 4.3, put comma after the matrix M, Finite state machine equation, encryption place the key relation in table,

Our responses: We are truthfully obliged to the reviewer for her/his carefulness and patience. We must make apologies sincerely for our carelessness of the missing full stops and commas in article. According to the comment, we have corrected all the above said recommendations and suggestions in order to improve the quality of our research article in revised manuscript.

3. Please do add some more explanation before the table of section 4.4. Please add some attacks analysis if possible in order to verify the encryption strength.

Our responses: We have added more explanation in section 4.4 with title sensitivity analysis in revised manuscript.

4. Please add captions to some of the tables given in your article (see page 8 & 9 -subsection 4.3.2; page 9- subsection 4.3.3; page 10-subsection 4.4).

Our responses: We would like to express our great gratitude to the reviewer for reading and review our manuscript and giving us many kindly and professional suggestions. Without the Reviewer’s help, we couldn’t improve the quality of the revised manuscript. And Reviewers' meticulosity and professionalism have the important guiding significance to us. According to the comment, we have added the captions for all tables given in our revised manuscript carefully and made corresponding corrections for better readability in the revised manuscript.

In the end, we would like to thank the reviewers again for the valuable time to review this paper and give this work an affirmative evaluation. According to the reviewers’ comments, we have tried our best to improve the manuscript and made corresponding corrections in the revised manuscript. We hope that the corrections will meet with approval.

Once again, thank you very much for your good comments and suggestions.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Majid Khan, Irfan Younas

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, the author developed a new structure for the image encryption scheme. The performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm has a better information security property.

The proposed algorithm is clearly described, but I feel like it will be great if authors can have a method session, so that they can put all the formulas for evaluation metrics into the method session (e.g. correlation caculation, MSE and PSNR etc), instead of listing them together with the results.

Table 11 – 12 list the comparison for the proposed method with other methods, but only for one image. It would be better to include the comparison for the other images that author used for a fair comparison.

Author Response

Please find the attached document contain response to second reviewer in detail.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper utilize Left Almost Semi-Group and Lorenz Chaotic System in image encryption. The idea is very interesting.

But, the presentation should be improved thoroughly.

Some concrete comments are given here:

1. Change the title as “An Efficient Digital Image Encryption Based on Semigroup and Lorenz Chaotic System”.

2. Correct the tense used in the abstract part by referring to
http://cc.oulu.fi/~smac/TRW/tense_abstract.htm

3. The first paragraph of the introduction is too long. It should be divided into some paragraphs with a specific topic.

4. Change “This paper is organized in 5 sections.” as “The rest of the paper is organized as follows.”

5. Cite the paper http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2018.2873472 and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sigpro.2018.03.010 at the end of “chaos theory is used in an extensive way for the development of image encryption mechanism”

6. As for security of the structure of permutation and substitution, please refer to
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sigpro.2016.10.002 (Latex source files at https://arxiv.org/format/1609.05352)

7. Replace “. MSE is described as pursue:” with “where”.

8. Delete “the following expression:” exactly.

9. Delete “the formula:” exactly.

10. Replace 4.3.x with itemization.

11. The format of author list in the reference part is chaotic. In some of them, the first name is placed first. Meanwhile, the last name is placed first. Please correct them referring to the requirement of the journal.

12. As for security of permutation (scrambling), please refer to https://doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2017.3051512

Author Response

Please find the attached point by point response to the third reviewer. Kindly acknowledge it.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Reposition the image/text in page 5 so that there is no longer a blank area.

Equations (10)-(12) do not look right (bad pdf conversion?).

Minor form and grammar errors are still present and these make the paper hard to follow in some places:

28:

"social media likewise facebook and twitter" - it should be "social media like Facebook and Twitter"

357:

"From these outcomes, the entropy estimations of all encoded images utilizing our proposed procedure method nearly to the hypothetical most extreme possible value i-e., 8. " - it should be "are close to the hypothetical ..."

173:

"Step 3: Apply substation" "Step 3: Apply substitution" ?

Author Response

Responses to the Reviewers’ Comments

Dear Reviewers:

Thank you very much for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “A New Efficient Digital Image Encryption Based on Inverse Left Almost Semi-Group and Lorenz Chaotic System” (Manuscript ID: entropy-379361). Your comments are valuable and thoughtful for revising and improving our manuscript and have the important guiding significance to our studies. We have read the comments carefully and have tried our best to make according to corrections which are marked as a track change with red lines in the revised manuscript. Meanwhile, we have written a point-by-point response to acknowledge your help and indicate where we have made revisions. The detailed responses to your comments and the main corrections in the paper are listed below.

Responses to the First Reviewer’s Comments

Point 1: Equations (10)-(12) do not look right (bad pdf conversion?).

Ans: We have corrected all these equations in revised version 2.

Point 2: Minor form and grammar errors are still present and these make the paper hard to follow in some places:

28: "social media likewise facebook and twitter" - it should be "social media like Facebook and Twitter"

357:"From these outcomes, the entropy estimations of all encoded images utilizing our proposed procedure method nearly to the hypothetical most extreme possible value i-e., 8. " - it should be "are close to the hypothetical ..."

173:"Step 3: Apply substation" "Step 3: Apply substitution" ?

Ans: Dear reviewer, we have corrected all the mistakes which you have been suggested.

Once again, thank you very much for your good comments and suggestions.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Majid Khan, Irfan Younas

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors addressed my comments, only one minor comment:

Line 356, Tables 11 - 2 records the information... should be Tables 11-12 record the information...

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We have corrected all mistakes in our final draft of the manuscript. Thank you very much for your constructive comments and suggestions which definitely improve our manuscript quality.

Regards

Reviewer 3 Report

1. Delete “ have” in the abstract.

2. “ Inverse Left Almost Semi Group” .It is improper to describe a noun with four adjectives.

3. The content of Table 3 is a figure, not a table.
http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWtablefigs.html

4. Change “Then:” as “Then, one has”

5. Delete the big empty space in the page #5.

6. The figures are seriously lossy. As for Word, .emf format should be adopted.

7. Any figure/table should not be presented in two adjacent pages. You can check this point by observing any textbook and think about the reason.

8. Delete “using following mathematical expression:”. Then the sentence can be read fluently. Please refer to any textbook on Calculus to see how to present an equation.

9. Delete “accompanying mathematical expression:”

10. Delete the semicolon before every equation.

11. Put Eq. (14)-(20) in different text sentences. Please read aloud to see whether you can read the paper fluently by yourself.

Author Response

Responses to the Third Reviewers’ Comments

Dear Reviewers:

Thank you very much for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “A New Efficient Digital Image Encryption Based on Inverse Left Almost Semi-Group and Lorenz Chaotic System” (Manuscript ID: entropy-379361). Your comments are valuable and thoughtful for revising and improving our manuscript and have the important guiding significance to our studies. We have read the comments carefully and have tried our best to make according to corrections which are marked as track changes with the red line at the left side of the revised draft.

1. Delete “have” in the abstract.

Ans: Dear reviewer, we have changed it and thanks for your suggestion.

2. “Inverse Left Almost Semi Group”. It is improper to describe a noun with four adjectives.

Ans: Dear reviewer, it is predefined definition and available in literature so far as cited in Refs. [7].

3. The content of Table 3 is a figure, not a table.
http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWtablefigs.html

Ans: Dear reviewer, we please see the corrected table 3.

4. Change “Then:” as “Then, one has”

Ans: Corrected.

5. Delete the big empty space in the page #5.

Ans: Please see the revised version.

6. The figures are seriously lossy. As for Word, .emf format should be adopted.

Ans: We have sent already all images to editing and typesetting manager who has added it in given templet. Moreover, we have opted .tiff files in each case. In near future, we will definitely consider your comments.

7. Any figure/table should not be presented in two adjacent pages. You can check this point by observing any textbook and think about the reason.

Ans: Dear reviewer, editorial team add all these figures in standard format and they know it better.

8. Delete “using following mathematical expression:”. Then the sentence can be read fluently. Please refer to any textbook on Calculus to see how to present an equation.

Ans: Corrected.

9. Delete “accompanying mathematical expression:”

Ans: Corrected.

10.Delete the semicolon before every equation.

Ans: Dear reviewer, there are certain terms in every equation which are directly connected with equations and have to be defined. Therefore, we don’t place full stop and place semicolon there.

11. Put Eq. (14)-(20) in different text sentences. Please read aloud to see whether you can read the paper fluently by yourself.

Ans: Dear reviewer, we have corrected mistakes under your comments and suggestions.

In the end, we would like to thank the reviewers again for the valuable time to review this paper and give this work an affirmative evaluation.

Once again, thank you very much for your good comments and suggestions.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Majid Khan, Irfan Younas